Vietnam Syndrome

Vietnam Syndrome is a term used in the United States, in public political rhetoric and political analysis, to describe the perceived impact of the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War on US foreign policy after the end of that war in 1975. Since the early 1980s, the combination of a public opinion apparently biased against war, a less interventionist US foreign policy, and a relative absence of American wars and military interventions since 1975, has been dubbed "Vietnam Syndrome." The term was coined in the context of the Cold War as part of a conservative and right-wing conservative polemic on US foreign policy, which was at first directed against the Détente policies of the Carter Administration (1977-1981).

Origins of the term

In the early 1980s, a number of conservative intellectuals, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and media pundits, started a polemic regarding the (in their view undesirable) effect of the Vietnam War on America's foreign and defense policies. The term Vietnam Syndrome was apparently first coined by Ronald Reagan during his presidential election campaign in 1980, in a speech to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922112-2,0.html Dueling over Defense - TIME ] ] [ [http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/london.html london.html ] ]

The term was used by conservative Americans to describe what they saw as an undesirable pacifism on the part of the American public and the US government in the aftermath of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This polemic rested on two main claims.

Firstly, conservatives claimed that in the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a risk that the public of the United States would oppose all future US military interventions due to the association of war in general with the specific social divisions that emerged between 1968 and 1973 due to the controversy in the US over the Vietnam war, the failure of the US to achieve its political goals in Vietnam, and the massive number of US and Vietnamese casualties. They argued that the US government after the Vietnam War avoided diplomatic and military intervention in the affairs of other states because it was afraid of arousing public opposition and because it wanted to avoid becoming dragged down in another "quagmire". This was a claim first made during the Carter administration.

Secondly, conservative politicians, media pundits and historians also claimed that the Vietnam war could have been won, if only the war effort had not been hampered and curtailed due to the anti-war protests and criticisms in the mass media and the resulting American disengagement from the war. This was a claim first made in the later stages of the war, when the US had started negotiating with North Vietnam and slowly withdrawing its troops and reducing their involvement in combat. In 1969, General Westmoreland protested against a pause in bombing and stated: "If we had continued to bomb [North Vietnam] the war would be over at this time - or nearly over." ["The Army and Viet Nam: The Stab-in-the-back Complex", "Time", December 12, 1969 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840467,00.html?promoid=googlep]

Reagan's speech to the VFW

In the speech in which he coined the term "Vietnam syndrome", Reagan alleged that the Soviet Union was outspending the US in the global arms race, and warned that America's global power was decreasing, while the Soviet Union was becoming more powerful. He accused the Carter administration of being "totally oblivious" to the Soviet threat. Alluding to the Paris Peace Accords (signed by the Nixon administration) as an undesirable example of compromise that needed to be avoided in the future, Reagan claimed that Carter's policies of Détente were endangering the continuation of US military superiority in the Cold War. Instead, Reagan argued, US policy should and could combine a commitment to protecting "freedom" and human rights with securing US globaldominance and US access to resources such as oil and minerals through military might and diplomacy: [Reagan, Ronald, "Peace: Restoring the margin of safety", speech at VFW Convention, Chicago, August 18, 1980 [http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html] ]

One wonders why the Carter Administration fails to see any threatening pattern in the Soviet presence, by way of Cuban proxies, in so much of Africa, which is the source of minerals absolutely essential to the industrialized democracies of Japan, Western Europe, and the U.S. We are self-sufficient in only 5 of the 27 minerals important to us industrially and strategically, and so the security of our resource life line is essential.

Then there is the Soviet, Cuban and East German presence in Ethiopia, South Yemen, and now the invasion and subjugation of Afghanistan. This last step moves them within striking distance of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. And is it just coincidence that Cuban and Soviet-trained terrorists are bringing civil war to Central American countries in close proximity to the rich oil fields of Venezuela and Mexico?

Clearly, world peace must be our number one priority. It is the first task of statecraft to preserve peace so that brave men need not die in battle. But it must not be peace at any price; it must not be a peace of humiliation and gradual surrender. Nor can it be the kind of peace imposed on Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks just 12 years ago this month. And certainly it isn’t the peace that came to Southeast Asia after the Paris Peace accords were signed.

Peace must be such that freedom can flourish and justice prevail. Tens of thousands of boat people have shown us there is no freedom in the so-called peace in Vietnam. The hill people of Laos know poison gas, not justice, and in Cambodia there is only the peace of the grave for at least one-third of the population slaughtered by the Communists.

Reagan also suggested that Americans could have defeated the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army, alleging that the American public had turned against the war due to the influence of North Vietnamese propaganda, and implying that the Johnson and Nixon administrations had been "afraid ... to win" the war in Vietnam.

Reagan equated the "Vietnam syndrome" not only with a reluctance on the part of the American public to support US military interventions, but also with feelings of guilt about the devastation brought about due to the Vietnam War and with feelings of doubt over the morality of America's intentions and actions during the war. Reagan, however, argued that America had fought for "a noble cause", blaming the war in Vietnam exclusively on North Vietnam's aggression:

For too long, we have lived with the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Much of that syndrome has been created by the North Vietnamese aggressors who now threaten the peaceful people of Thailand. Over and over they told us for nearly 10 years that we were the aggressors bent on imperialistic conquests. They had a plan. It was to win in the field of propaganda here in America what they could not win on the field of battle in Vietnam. As the years dragged on, we were told that peace would come if we would simply stop interfering and go home.

It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful, and we have been shabby in our treatment of those who returned. They fought as well and as bravely as any Americans have ever fought in any war. They deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern.

There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace. And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.

Reagan's speech thus expressed the main tenets of the conservative and reactionary polemic that ensued in the late 1970s.

Usage of the term since the 1980s

As with many political terms which arise from the practice of politics, the term is not clearly defined in academic works, but was rather defined as a matter of convention and usage in American politics as well as popular culture. The term Vietnam Syndrome should not be confused with "post-Vietnam Syndrome", a term coined in 1972 by Chaim F. Shatan to describe the anxiety disorder which affected US veterans traumatized by their combat experiences, which is today known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, the term Vietnam Syndrome does seem to allude by way of analogy to the psychological distress that many US soldiers and civilians suffered due to the failure of the US intervention in Vietnam and due to the stark divisions that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s between supporters of the American intervention in Vietnam and the massive anti-war movement, which lead the opposition to the Vietnam War.

In addition, the usage of the term "syndrome", borrowed from medicine, also strongly implies that public opposition to US military interventions is irrational and a consequence of having suffered a trauma. Richard Nixon in "No More Vietnams" (1985) called on Americans to "purge ourselves of the Vietnam syndrome" because it has "tarnished our ideals, ... crippled our will, and turned us into a military giant and a diplomatic dwarf."

Since the late 1970s, conservative Americans have argued that the US could have eventually brought about a complete military victory over the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong, and that such a victory would have resulted in a democratic, stable and pro-American South Vietnam. They allege that such an eventual victory would have been possible but was made impossible by the domestic oppostion to the war.

The accusation has been repeated in numerous books such as "Lost Victory" (1989), "Unheralded Victory" (1999), "The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam" (2002) and "Triumph Forsaken" (2006). In such books it has been claimed that the opponents of the war had "stolen" away an eventual victory from the American people.

Leftists critics of such views have argued that such accusations resemble the "Dolchstosslegende" (stab-in-the-back myth) that was spread in Germany by conservatives and by the nazis in the aftermath of the German capitulation in the First World War. In 1969, Time Magazine published the essay "The Army and Viet Nam: The Stab-in-the-Back Complex".

Critics on the left regard the reluctance of the American public to support US military interventions in the years after the Vietnam war as a healthy development. Michael Klare has argued in "Beyond the Vietnam syndrome" (1981) that "the American public's disinclination to engage in further military interventions in internal Third World conflicts" was "a prudent and beneficial alternative to the interventionist policies which led us into Vietnam in the first place."

From the 1980s onwards, key figures in United States conservative politics have repeatedly claimed that the Vietnam Syndrome has been "kicked". This claim is usually made after the United States has prosecuted a war that was seen by the US public to have been militarily or politically effective, such as the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama and the liberation of Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War. In politics, the claim that the Vietnam Syndrome has been kicked means that members of the government believe public opinion impediments to waging wars are no longer present. For example, President George H. W. Bush claimed in 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, that "the specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula." [Bush Sr., George, 'Radio Address to United States Armed Forces Stationed in the Persian Gulf Region', March 2, 1991 [http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2758&year=1991&month=3] ]

And yet when eighteen American soldiers were killed in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, Bill Clinton quickly withdrew all US forces from Somalia. Diplomat Richard Holbrooke called this event the emergence of a new "Vietmalia syndrome," one later reflected in Clinton's extreme reluctance to use military force in Bosnia.

In Hollywood cinema, the attempt at overcoming a Vietnam Syndrome was embodied by the Rambo films, in which the protagonist is a traumatized Vietnam veteran who singlehandedly nearly defeats America's communist enemies, communist Vietnam and the Soviet Union (after its invasion of Afghanistan), despite reluctant support and even opposition from the US government. [ [http://hnn.us/articles/4779.html Why Vietnam Haunts the Debate Over Iraq ] ]

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